https://lilymeyersohn.com Lily Meyersohn Fri, 06 Dec 2019 04:30:42 +0000 https://lilymeyersohn.com en https://lilymeyersohn.com/home Wed, 27 Nov 2019 17:47:35 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/home Lily Meyersohn, LMSW &nbsp; <img width="800" height="1185" width_o="800" height_o="1185" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6d861bb6bda1af52971c0ba6ce94788c6b2a42dd3f2d80ec937df5ff0b86229c/0Mey111_0Mey111-R1-036-16A.jpg" data-mid="211786779" border="0" data-scale="38" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/6d861bb6bda1af52971c0ba6ce94788c6b2a42dd3f2d80ec937df5ff0b86229c/0Mey111_0Mey111-R1-036-16A.jpg" /> https://lilymeyersohn.com/menu Wed, 27 Nov 2019 17:47:36 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/menu https://lilymeyersohn.com/about Wed, 27 Nov 2019 17:47:36 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/about about&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; I am a New York State licensed master social worker. I graduated from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.&nbsp; &nbsp;Since 2022, I have also been a researcher for the&nbsp;Institute for Public Accuracy.&nbsp;lilymeyersohn [at] gmail https://lilymeyersohn.com/writing Wed, 04 Dec 2019 21:08:46 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/writing Essays&nbsp; Take Care: The Invention of Codependency. Parapraxis, issue 7The Walking Drive.&nbsp;The American Psychoanalyst, issue 59.2Revisiting Freud’s ‘Discrediting’. The American Psychoanalyst, issue 58.2Exit Interview With My Grandmother. AudibleLiving in Extremity. The Los Angeles Review of BooksMoving Past Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The Los Angeles Review of BooksReporting The fight for mental health parity. The American ProspectTalkspace is a business first and a mental health resource second. TruthoutProfit-obsessed private equity is now dominating the US hospice system. JacobinInsurance companies are destroying New York’s home care industry. In These TimesHow Kathy Hochul abandoned home care workers. In These Times Moderna’s Covid vaccine price hike reveals government’s failure. The American ProspectNYC nurses’ deal is just a start – Health care advocates demand major reforms. Truthout Let’s take up the railroad workers’ fight for paid sick leave. We all need it. TruthoutCalifornia doctors sue over Covid ‘gag bill.’ CounterPunch Billionaire-funded ‘anti-science’ campaigns are causing unnecessary deaths. Truthout. Part of the series Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19.As new Covid boosters move forward, better outreach is needed to save lives. CommonDreams. Syndicated in CounterPunch.&nbsp; https://lilymeyersohn.com/collage Wed, 04 Dec 2019 21:09:04 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/collage collage &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="2325" height="2317" width_o="2325" height_o="2317" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b7556279c06b3879d0a14ae4aa0ba72e83aeba3d8a3be7e89cf4973c6b1d8eb7/4289C237-8D5C-46F4-BBF4-8A67F53B290C.jpg" data-mid="56020038" border="0" data-scale="57" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b7556279c06b3879d0a14ae4aa0ba72e83aeba3d8a3be7e89cf4973c6b1d8eb7/4289C237-8D5C-46F4-BBF4-8A67F53B290C.jpg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="2726" height="3407" width_o="2726" height_o="3407" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8d60d37d18269e90379d2386a66f1a3f8fa0e712019ca11383f32a6ba80a5e5/30D622AC-EDC1-419C-B3FB-8D7EA92F52C1.jpg" data-mid="56020043" border="0" data-scale="45" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8d60d37d18269e90379d2386a66f1a3f8fa0e712019ca11383f32a6ba80a5e5/30D622AC-EDC1-419C-B3FB-8D7EA92F52C1.jpg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="2730" height="3612" width_o="2730" height_o="3612" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a6fa63b5f67442fd89ac5e89317bb1eb25ba88134902813d6614b6a97b540f79/fullsizeoutput_1675.jpeg" data-mid="56020037" border="0" data-scale="42" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a6fa63b5f67442fd89ac5e89317bb1eb25ba88134902813d6614b6a97b540f79/fullsizeoutput_1675.jpeg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; <img width="1888" height="2485" width_o="1888" height_o="2485" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7229de20a14c65fb62343fc2a41f59c6ac6de4c7762525eed0a6b28438c2904b/fullsizeoutput_1832.jpeg" data-mid="56020041" border="0" data-scale="49" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7229de20a14c65fb62343fc2a41f59c6ac6de4c7762525eed0a6b28438c2904b/fullsizeoutput_1832.jpeg" />&nbsp; <img width="2010" height="2399" width_o="2010" height_o="2399" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c9f004309d1fd5733246c59b8e37d7daa67e9ccb4c4f15ceb7fffe401a9afeb/fullsizeoutput_1834.jpeg" data-mid="56020040" border="0" data-scale="50" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c9f004309d1fd5733246c59b8e37d7daa67e9ccb4c4f15ceb7fffe401a9afeb/fullsizeoutput_1834.jpeg" /> <img width="2467" height="2328" width_o="2467" height_o="2328" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dcc5e7e1cfc3cada634b8efb0399e4af23558d30f33cde8f746efa02a9867c81/fullsizeoutput_1837.jpeg" data-mid="56020209" border="0" data-scale="43" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dcc5e7e1cfc3cada634b8efb0399e4af23558d30f33cde8f746efa02a9867c81/fullsizeoutput_1837.jpeg" /> <img width="2870" height="3587" width_o="2870" height_o="3587" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ea1a09387e186d90459562c65d08f8c7d2ac7a4ab99a7c3aaa7811fbfed02c47/389B48C3-1E4B-4B31-944D-0432C18BF543.jpg" data-mid="56020208" border="0" data-scale="61" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ea1a09387e186d90459562c65d08f8c7d2ac7a4ab99a7c3aaa7811fbfed02c47/389B48C3-1E4B-4B31-944D-0432C18BF543.jpg" /> <img width="2856" height="3351" width_o="2856" height_o="3351" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1356efe9d47fa030028d1f80411ac5118bc0a718c6232f78f28eba0dc090745c/E78887DE-4010-4691-BFE2-9C1F0AFDB0A3.jpg" data-mid="56020207" border="0" data-scale="51" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1356efe9d47fa030028d1f80411ac5118bc0a718c6232f78f28eba0dc090745c/E78887DE-4010-4691-BFE2-9C1F0AFDB0A3.jpg" /> <img width="2820" height="3525" width_o="2820" height_o="3525" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1804f78b5b509c848cbb1eaf48180c3efe8163ea1290c4f521fd7b05b55e06a7/2B619187-E28E-4B45-BEFD-42DCC57FEE4A.jpg" data-mid="56020206" border="0" data-scale="41" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1804f78b5b509c848cbb1eaf48180c3efe8163ea1290c4f521fd7b05b55e06a7/2B619187-E28E-4B45-BEFD-42DCC57FEE4A.jpg" /> <img width="2815" height="3310" width_o="2815" height_o="3310" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/465a399b57cb8bd01829cb0414856ff683f2dfa25007ad71f0b327646171b33c/94A0924C-749B-4C8E-A0D3-310BC6CF7A1D.jpg" data-mid="56020175" border="0" data-scale="33" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/465a399b57cb8bd01829cb0414856ff683f2dfa25007ad71f0b327646171b33c/94A0924C-749B-4C8E-A0D3-310BC6CF7A1D.jpg" /> <img width="2868" height="3585" width_o="2868" height_o="3585" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4110dff1c3a9af94c1366d335a0c9e341ae35ae3345b74dc8701b10e4cf5cd63/3BFFEAF3-DF9C-4E1B-9F58-DE43DB3C0854.jpg" data-mid="56020171" border="0" data-scale="37" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4110dff1c3a9af94c1366d335a0c9e341ae35ae3345b74dc8701b10e4cf5cd63/3BFFEAF3-DF9C-4E1B-9F58-DE43DB3C0854.jpg" /> https://lilymeyersohn.com/read-here Fri, 06 Dec 2019 04:30:42 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/read-here writing featured on this site /// just take a peek https://lilymeyersohn.com/souvenirs-of-umbria Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:25:37 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/souvenirs-of-umbria SOUVENIRS OF UMBRIA notes from Central Italy, March 2018&nbsp; Would there be there lemons?&nbsp; Someone always liked lemons; the months she lived on the island she sent photographs of the hillsides spotted with their trees, all full of fruit. Once, she wrote to me about plunging her hand into a box full of mottled ones and coming up from the depths with a perfect and tiny one grasped there. Her nails were too long, perhaps she scraped some rind away. The lemon only cost 6 cents at the register. An open-air market. What do you write back to a perfect story about a tiny lemon? It seemed we would be at the right latitude for lemons. The flight map on the seat-back charted the 4,279 miles from JFK to FCO. The map was a time-zone gradient; behind the cartoon icon of the plane the world was dark, big cities starry with electricity. I traced my finger along the path, zoomed in on the Aegean, which looked like it was just about to be bathed in dawn. So there would still be two seas between us: Adriatic and Ionian. My finger dropped from the lit screen. 9 hours locked in aching place; I was rudely awakened with yogurt and sunlight. The four of us––my closest friend, Reba; her father; her stepmother; and I––did not glimpse much of the city as we sped the two hours north towards their new house in Umbria. We stopped at a gas station where you could purchase fresh sandwiches full of cheese and meat and nothing else. We bought four of them, wolfed salt down as the cashier complimented Reba’s stepmother’s Italian. There were gesticulations, enthusiasm. We sped on but the salt lingered for the duration of the week. The house, an old stone castle, was set on a hillcrest along a via belvedere. There should be a breeze, come summer, and the stones will keep the house cool in a dry heat. When we arrived, Leonard Cohen was crooning from Reba’s father’s speaker, lonely on the long dining room table. The song wasn’t something recognizable like “Suzanne,” which someone apologized for playing on the first night she brought me back to her opaque blue room in Providence.&nbsp; The house looks out on two mountain villages, one called Todi and another called Monte Castello di Vibio, which was so small we couldn’t find a post office on the early afternoon we went for cappuccinos and an initial walk. Apparently Italians don’t drink cappuccinos past 11am, something about milk turning the stomach too late in the day, so we were already committing our first faux pas. The buildings were medieval and there were cats napping, plants hanging, iron nailed to the doors. Up at the house, the mornings were bright and only warm in the places the sun could catch. Olive groves lay below us and barren vineyards stretched across the hills. There were cyprus and plum and chicory trees, overgrown lavender, something that smelled like rosemary, umbrella pines. Wide circles of burnt olive branches littered the hill, part of a sacrifice I did not understand. Still mostly unfurnished and unheated, the house was coated in layers of frozen air and dust. The kitchen empty but for a few half-finished bottles of wine, hardened cheese and a string of salami, crusty bread left in haste. Staples. Reba and I pulled a mattress out to what will one day be a dining room with views of the deep and lush valley of the Tiber River and slept by a working radiator, our bodies back-to-back to keep warm. This was the 15th year of our friendship, and Reba’s eyes were just as round and unabashed as they were in the 2nd grade. Over a platter of cured duck, her father asked Reba about her first recollections of me; then mine of her; we could not remember either. Maybe her eyes were my first memory. They say your eyes never grow. One night, the radiator thawing my feet, I dreamt of her again, of the girl I keep calling “someone”. She calls this “really funny” when I tell her––I promised us both I would text less but sometimes I shrug my shoulders at self-admonishment–– but I wonder if she understands why she cannot be herself, named, overheard, at home in Providence. Like when Reba and I visited some restaurant down the hill, I said someone told me the coffee here sucks and she said who told you that and I said I don’t know I can’t remember and she said oh yes you can it was _____. And the coffee’s fine. Unwilling to claim her name as mine there, or outside the library, or maybe even in the house on Arnold which is supposed to be all mine but where I cannot seem to clear my memory, of summer months a year behind now. It had already been a year; swifter than the ones that came before. I had probably thought of her every day for it. I think I had. In the radiatored dream I watched someone gnaw on cracked bread, pull meat off bones. Dig in. She once wrote to me about British men watching her as she ripped lamb from a shank. She once wrote to me about a stray with large deep eyes loping into a restaurant with Greek folk music. The waiters tossed him a shank and the dog curled up with it. How do you respond to a story about a stray dog? But in a dream. In the dream I watched someone pull me along the Roman cobbles. The city was open before us, and we tripped, drunk. I coughed through her cigarettes, as I did in August, but here I was so eager that I did not wait and instead sucked the flesh of her arm just before smooth shoulder, bit at that, too. Dug in. Strange, something like a satisfying nightmare. But only a dream––and lately, I am trying not to overanalyze dreams. Instead, I am trying to repeat to myself in a nonjudgmental and soothing tone of voice and feeling pretty sure that there is another, better person somewhere who deserves your time and care and words, and has the space to fully appreciate them in a way that I don’t I screenshot this email, read it aloud once, a whisper, growing stronger. How do you respond? I want to ask someone––what are you dreaming of? And are there still the nightmares? What about the being afraid of mundane places? which took me by surprise, given her placid disposition. But she had seen things to be disturbed by. There are things to be disturbed by here, I think: people selling wares on the streets, coming into literary bars at night––I am drinking vini dolci, it is all over my nostrils––and offering roses no one wants.&nbsp;She was picking up Arabic from the refugees. She called me habibti. Your work is important I once wrote her, you are doing big things, her life felt much bigger than mine. She was two years older but that wasn’t really the point. She knew the answers to lots of my questions about books, or about the difference between the definitions of words like oeuvre and opus, the difference between particular kinds of cheese and wine. She enjoyed bark-wrapped harbison. My friends called her pretentious. Now someone lives in Athens, where she works with refugees. go. She tells me many of them are alone; their families drowned or dispersed, with no way to be reunited without a spousal bond or a child under the age of 18. Were we in their positions, in camps, unmarried, 24 and 22, terrified to walk alone from wet tents to the outhouses in the night, we would be trapped. She calls this the condition of people who’ve been totally screwed. She is trying to ameliorate that condition.&nbsp; There are many more refugees in Athens than there are in Rome; this is why someone moved from Providence to Athens in the first place. went, gone. For a while, when we were in Providence, I thought we ran on the same wavelength or something. A May day under the sun at the Barrington town beach. We burned soft skin; her hair blond-brightened, it seemed, before my eyes; we laughed about books we had both read and foods we both liked and boys we both found pathetic. We used all the same types of words, though she knew more of them than I did. Conversation––everything, really, the whole relationship, which she always called affair or engagement or entanglement and was this to make it more exciting I never knew––felt very smooth. We both questioned aloud whether it should have been more strenuous. After a while it wasn’t smooth though, and then, slowly, and yet as if all at once––very, very strenuous.&nbsp; We never did really fall in love, anyway. But there wasn’t time and then she left for Europe. Or was this is the ending I told myself and my friends who never needed an explanation anyway and was this to make it easier I never knew. Months later, traipsing through a forest with a friend, thousands of miles from someone and from anyone else, my friend asks me but doesn’t it get boring, always agreeing? I think my friend always had more questions than I did, and listened harder. I came to Rome for 2 days on Reba’s dad’s dollar, on his house and the cappuccinos and yes sometimes a United States passport feels heavy, burns in my jacket pocket. Is that guilt? For the preposterous ease of our travel, the freedom of our movement, and the right to it. The guilt passed. Other disturbances passed too. And the four of us continue to walk. There was Perugia, with the walls, and then Florence, ochre at sunset. Last was Rome, with undreamed cobbled streets. We tried not to traverse a single one twice, and liked to laugh together and then easily grow silent, after many years side by side. I did not need to tell myself to have fun, or to remember to––the fun seemed to settle upon us, happen to us, by virtue of arriving in mostly-strange cities with no plans, no lists of things to do or see, knowing nothing, our ignorance liberating us to simply walk at random and as compelled. On our way, we peered in many shop windows; we searched for leather shoes but did not buy any; we yelled over the pontes, looking down at the rushing water. Sometimes it was midnight and we did not feel afraid to wander––our ease, our freedom, our right. Between the cities, we took trains which smelled of shit and cleaning product. The wind seeped through the windows as we moved amidst the countrysides, flapping the pages of my book: Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, about refugees living in Berlin in 2015. When I wasn’t reading, Erpenbeck’s words still flooded the spaces between my memories. And all too abruptly, the trains pulled in, the nights ran out, the trip ended. There was no choice to stay, to linger––a break was done and exams called us back. A week in Italy felt laughable. I tried not to compare it to the six months someone had already been living in Europe. But I thanked Reba’s father and her stepmother and we bought last-minute extra virgin olive oil in the airport, souvenirs for my parents. The months I was away last winter, I collected souvenirs bought for no one but always with someone in mind, rosebud balm and natural soap. She only ever requested postcards, which I stowed in my pack all the way home, but I knew no Greek address. They sat perched in the small window in my room in Providence; I had grown fond of them by now. My only unsent letters. Souvenir (the French) is the act of remembering. The object of a memory, the thing of it. What would be the object of a dream? My old professor, Litany for the Long Moment: “The way a dream can be a memory. / The way a memory can be a wish.” The book by Jenny Erpenbeck. That felt like the object of a dream, not souvenir. Maybe Erpenbeck’s words would also flood someone else’s spaces. The night I got home my body was 6 hours ahead and drained of water from a poisoned intestine and the flight and all the leftover accumulated salt. In delirium I spent twenty-six dollars to send a copy of the book to Someone, Tsimiski 21, Athina, Attica, 114 71. I had no idea if this was the right address, I just found it listed online for the center she worked at. I looked up “how to address an envelope to Greece.” It wouldn’t arrive for 10-12 business days. For 10-12 business days I tracked it like a flight path: Out for Delivery, Arrived, Out for Delivery. It left New York, went to London, went to Athens. I felt giddy, watching its progress. Out for Delivery. And then, the 12th day Undeliverable, Incorrect Address. It had gone all that way. I wanted to cry but had wasted whatever briny liquid my body had stored for her long ago. Why had I put my naivety and faith in the largest Internet retailer in the world to safely carry the object of a dream? Right into her distant hands. I was careless with the gift. Or no, she had been, with me. 6:55 AM PDT Amazon: Hello there how can I help you 6:55 AM PDT Lily: Hello, I need to change the address on my package it was incorrect 6:56 AM PDT Amazon: I will check the details and help you with this Go, Went, Gone 6:57 AM PDT Amazon: I have checked the details and the prodcut is already into advanced shipping stage Hence i am unable to change the address 6:57 AM PDT Lily: Are you sure? Online it says I can change the address if I contact you 6:58 AM PDT Amazon: We are working on it. 6:58 AM PDT Amazon: Yes I will try to change it. The carrier is out for delivery today so please set a house, so that its delivered on time ASAP 6:59 AM PDT Lily: Okay let me get a house address very quickly one second please “Can you give me your address?” I felt small, bothersome. Someone gave it very quickly one second please. I copied down the unfamiliar numbers and sent them to the Amazon live chat woman named Shateel who misspelled words so I did not trust her. 7:04 AM PDT Amazon: Please stay connected. I really appreciate your patience. 7:05 AM PDT Lily: I’m still here! I’m not leaving 7:07 AM PDT Amazon: This is taking longer than expected. My apologies for delay. We are again working on it 7:14 AM PDT Amazon: We have contacted the carrier and updated the address to them. They will redeliver the package on this address Someone, Dinokratous 9, Athina, Attica, 106 75. is this ok Lily? 7:15 AM PDT Amazon: are you ok Lily? 7:15 AM PDT Lily: Yes, sorry! That is perfect. Thank you! 7:16 AM PDT Amazon: I’m glad I was able to help. Have a great rest of day! 7:17 AM PDT Amazon: Please click “End Chat” to close this window. When I searched for Dinokratous 9, I understood that it was the apartment with a narrow balcony. Were there lemons? Someone’s boyfriend somewhere inside, counting down to her return. Slicing vegetables, or stretching long across their double bed, their medicines and books and clothes––the stuff of their lives––around him. The next day, Go, Went, Gone arrived. “Thank you so much,” someone said. She sent a photograph, her rough fingers clutching withered brown paper plastered with stamps and stickers. It had gone all that way. I wondered if it, too, felt tired.&nbsp; https://lilymeyersohn.com/simpatico Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:51:10 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/simpatico Excerpts from SIMPATICO&nbsp; I don’t know where he comes from. Even the full week before Christmas when I stayed with his family in a cruelly-named town, I’m sure I didn’t know. We watched “It’s A Wonderful Life”, I listened to them sing carols from memory, we rolled Martha Washington cream balls. Even then, I didn’t. His mother handmade me a stocking patterned with glitter-glued stars of David, filled it with souvenirs on a morning while I was still sleeping in her son’s twin bed upstairs, stiff green sheets, an old tabby cat kneading my breasts.&nbsp; There was supposed to be a falling into place, I thought, an oh, so this is how you grew. Among all these arms, and this kind. I thought there might be the taking me into the backyard to smell his father’s roses to look at his childhood, at what pricked and what stung and was difficult to forgive. [Kathleen Collins]&nbsp;I thought I might walk to the open barn and the horse named Joy, who was older than both of us, and that everything might change, that everything might be forgiven.&nbsp; || The rifle was heavy, the day he brought me by the pond to pierce a rotting gourd. So that rumor was true. The bronze pellet barely made ripples across the water as it sank, and I wondered how many littered the muck at the bottom. In the afternoons, which were colder than I expected from the South, we followed the banks of the crick down the hill, past broken barbed wire. He found a cow’s skull there one summer, but we didn’t find anything.&nbsp; I liked to drive quietly through the dead red fields of cotton. I left early Christmas morning, flew into an empty but merry LaGuardia, and was at my grandparents’ by three in the afternoon. Jews in Manhattan don’t get Christmas trees like my grandfather did, growing up in northern Germany, but we can still exchange novels or sweaters.&nbsp; || Two years now if you count the first which we never really seemed to. What have we done in that time? We have debated the meaning of our words, have translated each one into a brand-new vocabulary, stowing dictionaries in our pockets, their delicate feather-pages multiplying. We are trying to get through to something. He speaks painstakingly and slowly to get there. Other days, he tries out my own words. They roll misfits around his tongue, clunky and unfamiliar. I pour everything out and then delete later. I didn’t mean that. That’s not true, what I just said. But when we finally reach something we like the sound of, we repeat it together until we believe it truth.&nbsp; || Do you worry about him, my mother asked. She must. But I think that would require me to understand his pain. || I start reading Anne Carson again. In 2013, a New York Times critic interviewed her over email. I hadn’t read anything of hers at that point. On writing, Carson responded, and all in lowercase: we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. || “Even when they were lovers&nbsp; he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, Penny for your thoughts! and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumpster sticker or a dish he’d eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them developed a dangerous cloud.” (Carson, Autobiography of Red) || The cloud between us: he was always trying to explain to me. We lay in bed and I asked what when he looked at me, was it concentration or vacancy, and then what again when he looked away to gaze at something beyond my vision. I wanted to know what went on inside his head. How do you give someone meaning? I asked last Thursday, so bored in chemistry lecture with coffee refluxing in my belly that that was what I came up with. He was back in another city by then, the city where he lived between our visits, and had been sending me poems about things I could not decipher. They were made of things that existed so far from my heart––crabs, pirates, bloodletting letters. Snakes and criminals. Crooks. || He once said that people in relationships are on average just as happy or unhappy as single people only because the bad relationships average out with the good ones. Facts like these inevitably make one question––across from him, studying him, studying his specific unhappiness––whether one is happier or less happy than one would be alone. There is not a clear answer to me. Should there be? An answer that springs off the tongue, drops off it, like the I love you.&nbsp; || His face was in my hands. I want to say I love you aloud but I am afraid. || The first day it crossed into unseasonable weather, we drove in a muted sunset to the bay. I kept yelling I am enraptured Raptured. He kept yelling other things, chasing dogs, fools. The fog was curling off the water, a dark and coiling smoke. He had never been to the Barrington town beach before, and knew nothing of my memories there. I showed him the lady slippers, the sand showered with them, and he repeated lady in her slippers all the way down to the crook in the sand. We ran back crook in the sand crook in the sand crook crook crook pretending to be other people. He tried to show me how the water was pink. I tried to show him how the sky was. There isn’t any meaning to make there, in that difference, so don’t worry about trying to find it. But I always desperately wanted there to be.&nbsp; || Wolf boy singing or howling unclear Oh Lily can you see all that you do not see in me Oh Lily will you please accept the things I cannot be Lily will you close your eyes before you try to kiss me Oh Lily will you miss me will you miss me I played this song of his for my friends on a Wednesday approaching midnight when none of us could be forced to do any homework. For a moment our breath fixed in Clementine’s yellow kitchen. He has a beautiful voice;&nbsp;Eve’s eyes could have been wet, but they weren’t. They asked me to play it again. || I’m glad we’re on the same page, he says.&nbsp; page? page about what? your apathy? our absence of need for one another? what is the negotiation here, my boy my b my bb baby bubba buppy bucket snuppy sugar bucket honey bucket These are names we croon to one another, nestling within epithets and joints and was it to make it all sweeter I never knew. I wanted to make sure, he repeats. Sometimes when we drive in the family station wagon, our voices swelling inside the muffle of the speeding glass and steel, we discuss this. The day we drive into muted sunset, for example, we are engaged in a theoretical discourse: calm, low-voiced, composed. Not a fight. We are discussing whether we should break up simply because the prospect of it wouldn’t mean the end of either of our worlds. We are laughing together about it. || But sometimes I feel like you act as though I don’t have a heart he tells me. I have never seen him hurt by me before; I have never made his lower lip quiver; we used to laugh that there was nothing I could do that might cause him pain. This is the night he drives to my parents’ apartment to eat my father’s red wet lamb an hour after we did as a family, banished boy, and he sits below me, my hands resting on his bones. Which are starting to protrude again. He has always eaten like a starving bird, the hours stretching long between his meals; the meals, at least, are unfreckled. There is little to say besides nod because yes, I think that’s probably true. It was easier that way, wasn’t it, to say he simply did not feel the way other people felt. And certainly did not love the way I did. Now he is cradling me, in my sorrow or his, it’s unclear. Unclear which is wrapping the other––only his arms are longer and thereby contain me better than mine contain him. All the bones are sticking out, and he is calling me all the words that begin with the letter b Why is this the part that made it better? my god must we always bury ourselves in other people’s bones? https://lilymeyersohn.com/get-the-body-into-you Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:52:27 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/get-the-body-into-you GET THE BODY INTO YOU: ROMANTIC INCORPORATION IN TONI MORRISON’S WORKS&nbsp; I can’t quite remember, but I thought there was a night when a man lay in my bed and spoke with his eyes closed, as he often did, and I watched his mouth, slow and measured. I thought he said he often dreamt of flying as a boy. Which is interesting because that week we read Song of Solomon and my professor, Kevin Quashie, said Milkman’s flying makes him part of everything, unlimited and totalitarian. Peculiar word to use. I had thought it was surrender. But I guess that’d be falling. Is it like the words the man was translating from German, in-cor-por-ate? About trying to eat the object of love. Get the body into you. Or rather, be enveloped by it. And which is it, and can it be both? I told him about the cheeks of the women I’ve loved, how I have wanted to slurp at them, and afterwards I wondered if I shouldn’t have shared such a thing. For instance, I didn’t tell him about the dream I had that spring; how we stumbled down cobblestones and I bit at the flesh of her shoulder, how there was no blood. ∞ At 22, I wrote a letter to my mother. I wondered how much we were part of one complete thing, as much as we struggle to separate. I wrote: The life (singular) that follows… this is the whole point, I’ve decided, that maybe it’s plural, it’s two, as much as we want it to be one. And also that as much as we want it to be two, it is always one. In other words, this letter is grappling with how two can be one and also how one can be two. I’m sorry because all the words are the same words but if you read them closely, you will see. That letter was not a feign, but it did represent an omission. I knew it then too, because I never thought that blurry line––mother/child––was the only one like it, simply the one that comes most obviously. But I think we are always trying to figure this out––who is who, and where is the bound, and can we erase it––when it comes to the people we love. By extrapolating to other kinds of relationships, then, my purpose in what follows is to try to be more expansive than I dared be before, and in doing so, be more truthful. When I say “other kinds of relationships,” I mean the people we are in love with. The italicized word, forever burdened to help us distinguish between this type of love and mother-love. But to be in something. Inside of and consumed by. ∞ So basically, you should read this aloud. You should read it like I read it to her on the Tuesday night she lay with her hands on my collarbones and I could feel the heave of my chest so acutely since I was trying to catch my breath through such a long sentence. The book had nothing to do with her eyes, which I used to call whale eyed, so wide and so blue and so close up to mine that they almost morphed into one. That night I remembered that this woman had eyelashes all over her, like on her eyelids and the space around her mouth. All the hair was the same shade of brown. And the contours of her body made no sense, some parts spindly, others like cream. I wanted to shove everything in my mouth. Good and nice and nice and good and good and I love you and nice and good and good and I love you, all overlapping. We repeated these sorts of things on nights when the moon was out, when my eyes turned fuzzy and dry with the passing of the hours. And we didn’t repeat them in that order at all, but I’ve got to record something about these days, and if not this then what? My hands, running over her face again? Do you think everyone feels like this? Sometimes she wore all white, sometimes my father’s beach shirt again. She liked to put her underwear over the tops of her pants and pull. Once, we were on a couch in the living room and Clem was singing at the top of her lungs, heartbroken, but then the boy chose her after all, so everything worked out––except we didn’t know that while she was singing so the singing was still kind of heartbreaking. After that we all jumped on the bed and then we lay piled together. My heart beat quickly. Their breaths near my neck. She drooled a little. That was also the week our professor told us that in college he would lie in bed with his friends and sob, practicing for heartbreak. ∞ Get the body into you. These feelings can be intensely physical, but the impulse also operates on a more abstract level, and I want to think about why I might want the object of my love to become part of myself. I use “object” knowingly and despairingly. To take a person and fit them inside ourselves, to carry them around and force them to rest softly, just above the belly. Is this a selfish desire? I was a spoiled child, after all. Toni Morrison’s Guitar speaks to Hagar as if she still is one. “The stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight.” (Song of Solomon, 306) To refer to this iteration of love as an unsatisfied appetite indicates just how physical Hagar’s desires are, but Guitar also denigrates those desires through his comparison. Others might have stopped me earlier in that sentence to correct my wording––Hagar’s not in love; she’s infatuated, she’s obsessed. But to pass off what one interprets as love as solely obsession essentializes love and assumes it operates universally. Call it what Hagar feels it is, for who is Guitar to call Hagar’s inner life “little”? As much as Morrison works to figure love, and Black love in particular, by offering it in its myriad array of forms, Morrison also consistently refuses to essentialize it. It’s not a stretch to say that Black scholars and writers disproportionately hold that onus when it comes to depicting Black life writ large, particularly to a white audience: an audience that Morrison has repeatedly insisted that, as much as white readers including myself may identify with or find solace in her characters, she has never written and will never write to or for. Last spring I thought a lot about Cornel West’s strain of American pragmatism, wherein he attempts to deconstruct the ways that knowledge systems become oppressive. (Cornel West, “Race and Social Theory,” 261) West in particular has written that while moving towards a deep historical consciousness, one must reject any theories that falsely essentialize, dogmatize, or romanticize. In doing so, West commits to a continual acknowledgment of the multiplicity of truth, and the chance that truth contains gaps, not all of which must be filled. I see this as advocating for a kind of opacity in itself; again, an understanding that a white reader cannot read a “total” Black experience through Morrison’s texts. Her novels––the bulk of her oeuvre––compose a body of knowledge and truth. That body holds some mirrors to West’s philosophical theory when it comes to Morrison’s absolute denial to essentialize, dogmatize, or romanticize the love of her characters and the love and lives of Black individuals off the page. Returning to Guitar’s speech, then, (for that is what it is; Hagar does not speak) we may read it as encompassing some criticism of Guitar, rather than Hagar. More than a “selfish desire,” can the extreme pull that Hagar or any other character feels be an empathic one? Joining without belonging, without possession? The danger or power we might encounter if and when we let ourselves erase the limits between two people. I am nearly twenty-four this fall and none of these feelings are new. My mother told me last month that some relationships are more about ourselves than the other person, and I thought it was funny that she said it quietly, trying to be kind, since we both knew she was speaking of me and an old lover, but the point is me, because I just said it was never even about that old lover. How Proustian of you, mama. But I have long hated Proust’s version, that all love was ever about was plumbing the depths of one’s own interiority. What about with the others? I wanted to ask. How much could it ever be about two, becoming one? And don’t you understand that this is what I have wanted? ∞ Let’s name this conviction romantic “incorporation.” An ugly word, perhaps, for an act I believe would be beautiful. But I find this conviction in many of Toni Morrison’s texts, which makes sense because Morrison paints worlds that any reader might recognize––real, possible, Black worlds––as much as they are imagined fiction, even dipping into the fantastic. And although I have made it clear that Morrison was not writing for me, that does not mean I don’t see myself in many of the characters she produces. Those acts of recognition allow me to seek clues to my own experiences in her words, regardless of the fact that I have never found an explicitly romantic or sexual relationship between two women in Morrison’s works. Still, that recognition does not hinge upon comparing or contrasting––it is simply the stamp of good literature, how it plays with our senses, emotions, and memories. There are no “ideal” relationships in Morrison’s books. Because these are real and possible worlds, the relationships that exist within them are necessarily flawed. We cannot point to one relationship, take notes, and transpose those qualities onto our own lives. As an alternative, Morrison offers us portraits of relationships that often look one way and then, on further examination, reveal themselves to be something entirely different. In those gaps, I find my meaning. ∞ Take one passage in Sula I have carried with me lately, in which the title character makes love to Ajax. On the surface, the two seem on the brink of breaking the boundaries between them, together getting towards what I see as a higher state of being. Not so, on revisit. The scene is interspersed with an internal conversation. Sula speaks to herself––the intermittent italics seem to suggest that she never says any of this to Ajax aloud––as though she is telling both of them a story but only in her mind. It begins: If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear. It will flake away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. I can see it shining through the black. I know it is there… Sula is interested in rubbing away Ajax’s own body to get to his core, and she uses a piece of skin itself (the chamois) to see past and through his skin. She then meets the gold leaf, a gilding material, inherently thin and used to mask. And if I take a nail file or even Eva’s old paring knife––that will do––and scrape away at the gold, it will fall away and there will be alabaster. The alabaster is what gives your face its planes, its curves. As we move forward in Sula’s story, Morrison paints a sensual and softly violent image. The scene is something of a still life. The tools to scrape away Ajax’s body are feminine and initially, seemingly innocuous––a nail file, or a knife used to peel fruits and vegetables. Sula cuts away at Ajax, digging deeper, to get to the alabaster below: a soft, malleable stone, often used for carving. Ajax becomes a statue, subject to Sula’s own manipulation and vision. Her ability to carve his statue undergirds a terrifying authority, because that authority does not suggest that she is shaping him, changing him for the better, but rather, shaping her image of him. Building him up to be something he is not––not better or worse, simply wrong. Mistook or misread, Ajax remains un-receiving. “There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.” (The Bluest Eye, 205) Their love becomes something much more sinister, reminding us that even when we deeply want to see our object clearly and completely, and thus internalize a person “correctly,” we are often unseeing of who others are. Meanwhile, Ajax is “shorn”––staunched––as is the couple’s potential for exchange. Sula has crafted Ajax’s statue, but that statue is hollow, as she has pressured him into something he did not ask her for. The stability of their relationship, too, remains fairly shabby. Taken together, Morrison devises a conversation in which it looks as though Sula is trying to get closer and closer to her lover; in reality, the materials and language Morrison embeds within the passage function as clues to the fallout of their relationship a few pages later, when Ajax leaves Sula, something that comes as a shock only to her. Then I can take a chisel and small tap hammer and tap away at the alabaster. It will crack then like ice under the pick, and through the breaks I will see the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs. For it is the loam that is giving you that smell… I will put my hand deep into your soil, lift it, sift it with my fingers, feel its warm surface and dewy chill below. Ignorant to the fact that Ajax no longer wants to be there with her, Sula continues her slow craft as the passage drags on. The image of ice breaking under a pick brings me, briefly, to Franz Kafka’s entreaty of literature to be an axe that breaks the frozen sea within us. Once broken, the two can then cry out together. Sula is not successful here, but what might happen when we can break that frozen sea? I imagine the result as sounding something like when Beloved and Denver and Sethe all cry out, amorphously yet as one: “You are my face; you are me I drank your blood I brought your milkYou are my face; I am you” (Beloved, 255) Morrison does not often slip into verse, and when she does, it suits our purposes to wonder why. In Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” she famously writes that “the Black mother within each of us––the poet––whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand.” (Sister Outsider, 38) Beloved’s capacity, first to feel and second to express and demand those feelings of others becomes a unifying act, joining all three women in reciprocal delight/devastation. These poems are “half sentences, day-dreams,” like the conversations between Beloved and her sister. But they can then be transfigured into shared meaning––a meaning “more thrilling” than any primary “understanding could ever be.” (Beloved, 67) It is only here, in Beloved’s poetic register, that Sula herself could possibly locate the core she has been trying to inch towards in Ajax. She imagines this core as a loam: rich, easy to till, composed of ideal proportions of sand, silt, and clay. And once she thinks she reaches it, we glimpse a shadow of her goal’s realization––holding Ajax’s body and his heart, feeling his essence for herself, all over her hands. Not just the warm and the good, but also the chill and the bad. I will water your soil, keep it rich and moist. But how much? How much water to keep the loam moist? And how much loam will I need to keep my water still? And when do the two make mud? As the conversation finally comes to a close, it fully fractures. Sula is no longer the confident artist molding Ajax with her own hands and tools, but a doubtful woman holding tightly onto a relationship that she simultaneously seems to know is hopeless to cling to. Sula is determined to water this soil, to keep the relationship healthy and flourishing. At the start, she seems nearly obstinate: I will, she thinks. But then her deliberateness collapses, as it dawns on her that she doesn’t know how to do that––how much to give of herself, how much to take of him. We often ask of our lovers: tell me, am I enough? Am I too much? “Don’t love her too much. I am loving her too much.” (Beloved, 255) I remember Beloved, where we encounter the word “thick” to describe love, in Paul D.’s criticism of Sethe’s love. Like honey, cloying, close, hard to stand the smell. Or I remember The Bluest Eye: “love, thick and dark as syrup.” Something to smell, taste, “sweet, musty… everywhere in that house. It stuck… it coated.” (12) To Claudia, this variety of love is solely positive. It is a love of survival, that which cares for you when you are ill, resting on your forehead. To a child, no love is too close. But grown lovers are not mothers doting on sick children. Sula is rightly concerned with her love becoming too thick. She seems frightened that she might be cloying, too. She knows there is an uncertain balance at play here, as with the loam itself, but she never does ask––am I enough? And if not, what is it that you want and need from me? And so Ajax never answers. He remains a statue in her perspective as much as ours. A radical revision of this passage would allow Ajax to respond. What might he say? Might he say, as Beloved does, “I want you to touch me on the inside part… You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name.” (Beloved, 137) This excerpt between Beloved and Paul D. in the shed does not ostensibly suggest any intense connection between the two. But Beloved nonetheless demands something of Paul D; the “I want” quickly becomes “you have to.” As skewed as some of the other power dynamics may first seem in this scene (Paul D. is decades older than Beloved), Beloved holds real power when she says, aloud, what she needs––again, “chartering a revolutionary demand.” From a political perspective, Beloved’s demand is notable because it resists the socialization that Beloved has been brought into as a Black female subject in this era. Grandma Baby herself remarks that “slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that… they were not supposed to have pleasure deep down.” But Grandma Baby has taught her family that they should “always listen to [their bodies] and love [them].” (Beloved, 247) Beloved acts upon that lesson. More, what Beloved needs is to be known and understood: on the inside part. Forget physical anatomy. Ajax could say the same. Further, Paul D. needs to call Beloved by her name. This is something Sula will fail to do: we discover just a few pages later that she never even knew Ajax’s full name. Through the very end, as the structure of the italics remind us, Sula remains trapped within her own interiority even as we are privy to it. What happens in Sula’s head ignores what occurs between the italics, the sections that play out in front of her very eyes. We might read the sections that I, too, have ignored as components of a coinciding and interrupting conversation, one that never fully aligns and in which Sula never listens. Her eyes exclusively turn “inward,” failing to arrive at the give and take that she knows is necessary for a sustainable relationship. Thus this passage––with all its sweeping possibility––remains a missed connection. ∞ And so it goes, more often than not––in Toni Morrison’s worlds as often as in our own, this incorporation I have longed for is often impossible. Still, something tugs at me, recently. “Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know,” Toni Morrison says, early on in her eulogy for her friend James Baldwin. Not altogether detached from my mother’s quiet reminder is this assurance that even when we fail to know others completely we may nevertheless come to know ourselves that much better. As Florens attacks the Blacksmith in the throes of the outrage and disbelief that come with the newfound and sinking knowledge that “I am nothing to you… that I have no consequence in your world,” only then does she fly. Part of everything. In this instant, Florens’ feathers finally lift; she “unfolds,” unraveling her own intricacies. But Florens also tells herself, more than she tells the Blacksmith, “No. Not again. Not ever.” (A Mercy, 167) She is wrong, I think. It may happen again. She should be prepared for that. But I also think with every bit nearer we find ourselves to our own “inside parts”––more nuanced and complex at each turn––the more capable we are of seeing others as they know themselves to be, too. Just as nuanced and complex and just as human. No, Sula and Ajax will not exit their story with a total comprehension of one another and their capacity for incorporation, and yes that may mean they now understand themselves better, and that’s all fine and good, but the last and most essential piece is that they must also try again, because all this means that they may both be better equipped to come to know and feel others. Florens now perceives that the “claws of the feathered thing did break out because I cannot stop them wanting to tear you open the way you tear me.” (A Mercy, 187) That undeviating wanting––to be torn open and to tears others open too––may bear us through. That is our limitlessness. And for that reason I remain attached to the drive towards incorporation as something worth wanting, worth trying for, however stubbornly, however impossibly. ∞ I will never love like this again. I will love better but I will never love like this again. ∞ This December I lay in bed as my watch made a whirring moon on the sunlit wall, her fingers resting on my throat again, and I was frightened. For I did not know what else I would have to show for all of this time. For the way we had one other and yet probably never would, and for the way we pretty much knew it all along. I asked her to tell me the things that were right and she whispered: my body and your body shoes on feet. rings on fingers. Is that good enough? Yes, that’s really good. ∞ Neither of us had the heart to ask: you mean that’s it? Nights, too late, too much time gone behind us? And never the declaration, THE PROMISE of that Norwegian book we loved at eighteen and nineteen that I couldn’t make but printed out regardless and kept stowed in a cardboard box, like I toss them away, I choose you, now, today!, forever, it has been you and I want it to be that way unforeseeably, I want to be yours, you mine, our lives, smash them together, so life, just one, I want to cry to you, and get angry at you for your neglect, and then make up, make love, wake up, on and on, wake up another morning, and another morning, and have it still be you, and then bike along these small wet streets with some sliver of awe that is this world and the sliver of awe that is you, and me, knowing and looking and seeing and hearing and having you, and all that too for you, me you me you me you. You, you, you. https://lilymeyersohn.com/with-two-voices Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:52:05 +0000 Lily Meyersohn https://lilymeyersohn.com/with-two-voices WITH TWO VOICES: MOTHER-LOVE IN SULA PART I: BABY Because this is how I felt that Sunday, nothing to do with Twitter or the Uighurs or the slaughter of Jews older than my grandmother, or anything else very real and very terrible: The rain was more like wind that day, the first nor’easter blowing through. My boots barely grazed the thin yellow leaves in pools on the pavement. I tried to concentrate on those yellow leaves and how luminous they were under my dry feet rather than on anything in my mind, which I knew was all made-up anyhow. That’s the frightening part––fear itself always being worse than fear of something touchable. And I woke feeling better, which meant myself, and called my mother. I have long wanted to tell her not to worry, even as I worried. That day I did not lie. Yet she guided me in a way I should not have doubted she would before. Wasn’t she was once twenty-two and afraid? Oh, you understand. Oh, you too. This guidance came as a rush of relief, hot tears. I licked them. So this is a letter about mother-love, which is a better and more accurate translation of amor matris than ‘love of the mother’ because it refuses to distinguish whether it is the mother or the child doing the loving (Joyce wrote: subjective and objective genitive) and thus similarly obscures the line between mother and child, since they may not be separate objects anyway. PART II: MOTHER/BABY A professor once suggested I always start with a question. My question, then, is about mother-love, about those lines between mother and child, how blurry they can get. About how much love to give, about when enough is enough, about whether there ever could possibly be an “enough.” To answer my question, I looked to Toni Morrison’s Eva, from Sula. A mother who said enough! This is how she said it: “When Eva spoke at last it was with two voices. Like two people were talking at the same time, saying the same thing, one a fraction of a second behind the other. ‘He give me such a time. Such a time. Look like he didn’t even want to be born. But he come on out. Boys is hard to bear. You wouldn’t know that but they is. It was such a carryin’ on to get him born and to keep him alive. Just to keep his little heart beating and his little old lungs cleared and look like when he came back from that war he wanted to git back in. After all that carryin’ on, just gettin’ him out and keepin’ him alive, he wanted to crawl back in my womb and well… I ain’t got space for him in my womb. And he was crawlin’ back. Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more. I birthed him once. I couldn’t do it again. He was growed, a big old thing. Godhavemercy, I couldn’t birth him twice. I’d be laying here at night and he be downstairs in that room, but when I closed my eyes I’d see him… six feet tall smilin’ and crawlin’ up the stairs quietlike so I wouldn’t hear and opening the door soft so I wouldn’t hear and he’d been creepin’ to the bed trying to spread my legs trying to get back up my womb. He was a man, girl, a big old growed-up man. I didn’t have that much room. I kept on dreaming it. Dreaming it and I knowed it was true. One night it wouldn’t be no dream. It’d be true and I would have done it, would have let him if I’d’ve had the room but a big man can’t be a baby all wrapped up inside his mamma no more; he suffocate. I done everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man. Eva couldn’t see Hannah clearly for the tears, but she looked up at her anyway and said, by way of apology or explanation or perhaps just by way of neatness, “But I held him close first. Real close. Sweet Plum. My baby boy.’” Toni Morrison, Sula: 71-72 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We can begin at the very beginning, before Eva even starts to speak. Alongside Hannah, her daughter, we’ve been waiting: there’s been a silence, and the passage tells us about Eva speaking before we hear her. Isn’t this a kind of pregnancy? To be known before you are known at all, to be important before you’re even seen. Just felt. Your kick, in fact, is felt. The passage tells us that “when Eva spoke at last it was with two voices.” We can read this not only as though there has been a pause but also as at last, it was with two voices. As if Eva and Plum have been speaking separately all this time and only now can they speak together. This concept will frame the entirety of her monologue, as Eva struggles to delineate the conflict between mother and child––more specifically, the conflict between their fusion (pregnancy) and separation (birth, and the lives that follow). I initially wrote that phrase as the “life that follows,” but this is the whole point, I’ve decided, that maybe it’s plural, it’s two, as much as we want it to be one. And also that as much as we want it to be two, it is always one. In other words, this essay is grappling with how two can be one and also how one can be two. + Even once we accept that Eva speaks as “two in one” and only “half of two” here, there is an inherent complication. “Like two people were talking at the same time, saying the same thing, one a fraction of a second behind the other.” Yes, mother does become a fraction of the second (more or less half, though modern genomics tends to complicate even that). But taken less mathematically, we notice that the two voices are not speaking exactly together, but instead slightly over/overlapping. There’s no competition or hierarchy because we don’t know who is behind the other, or who is louder or clearer. Like Hannah, we can hear them both, together. This aspect of the form serves to situate us. We will consume this entire scene through Eva’s perspective, but that perspective will eventually show us just as much about Eva as it will about Plum, and the way that Eva sees Plum and their relationship. And that projection always says more about the speaker than the object itself. In Morrison’s own words, “the subject of the dream is the dreamer.” + This is all a false start. The true beginning of this meditation is when Eva starts speaking––starts being heard. When she speaks, she too begins in the beginning: with Plum’s gestation. “Look like he didn’t even want to be born…such a carryin’ to get him born.” Eva inverts the possibilities of “carry,” which we generally associate with pregnancy itself and then afterwards, as the mother holds the child, carries him through the world before he gets too heavy. Here, carrying becomes substitute for the act of labor. The “getting out” is a labor in the same way as the holding is––both are burdens. And both then mirror the effort to “keep him alive. Just to keep his little heart beating and his little old lungs cleared.” At the close of Plum’s life, Eva seeks coherence by pointing to the way it opened, as though the clues to our fates lie in how we swam inside the womb and how quickly we were able to depart it. As Eva relates the way that Plum didn’t want to leave the womb to Hannah, her first-born, we are thrown into the turbulence of this passage, which is so grounded in the physical world, focused on Eva and Plum’s bodies. See Plum’s height (six feet), his little heart, his little old lungs. Messing up his pants. These are the first sites of familiarity to a mother and child, though we may soon realize, despairingly, that they are so much more changeable than we ever fathomed. More, this is where half the labor happens. The luggage, the burden, the carrying––between aging bodies. One growing, one shrinking. + Simultaneously, however, the action of the text here also reflects a physical impossibility, totally independent from that extreme version of corporality just discussed. Instead, there is something fantastic at work, along Todorov’s definition, wherein we are unable to define events as either uncanny or as marvelous. Eva does not hesitate to accept that Plum objectively wanted to re-enter her body, that he was “crawlin’ back.” Lying awake at night, Eva would hear Plum “creepin’ to the bed trying to spread my legs to get back up my womb.” Morrison includes the expression “spread my legs” carefully. I think we are meant to cringe here, yearn to shield ourselves from the image of a grown man opening his mother’s legs in order to worm his way back in. The nature of this scene as either infantile or fully incestuous is perhaps unfortunately where its devastating truth is located, in its duality and the failure in our capacity to define and confine it. But this is only a nightmare, a dream Eva keeps having, “dreaming it and I knowed it was true. One night it wouldn’t be no dream.” Like through much of Sula, although Eva is confident in her version, we are not handed the tools to decide or confirm how much of the excerpt is based in reality or not. But the ambiguity itself is just as germane, for it leads us once again to the conclusion that the boundaries are hazy between two objects that we want to assume are just that, separate entities: in this case, real and fake, fact and metaphor. + In the world of the novel, this can all be real. So let’s say that Plum is trying to get back in. What would that mean, to be born twice? We only get to be born once––as much uncertainty as there is in this world, that much is certain. But other than that, how much are we assured? How much can we get, and how much do we deserve to get? This is where my initial concern around “enough” becomes so significant. Am I enough? Am I too much? we ask of our lovers. Do we ask the same of our mothers? I remember Beloved, where we encounter the word “thick” to describe love. Like honey. The way it can be so cloying when it gets too close. Hard to stand the smell. Eva seems to refuse too thick a love. This isn’t to say she is thin––hard, hardened, cold. She simply seems to know she never can be enough when Plum is asking for something she can no longer give. The body, especially, depletes. Eva nearly starts to ramble on this point. She has to “keep him out… A big man can’t be a baby wrapped up inside his mamma no more; he suffocate.” The vocabulary (wrapped, suffocate) is one of runaway closeness, a smothering. We normally associate that smothering with mother––“over-mothering.” Here, we somehow witness its transformation into the reverse; although Eva worries about Plum’s suffocation, in reality, she is also being stifled by him. The opposite of this suffocating closeness would be independence. The room to grow alone. But there’s no “space… not in my womb” for that growth, since Plum is already “growed.” While Plum continues to want to fuse, both mother and son remain in freefall. So Eva steps away, thereby asserting both of their autonomies by rejecting not Plum himself or their mutual and endless connection but rather, the erosion of her son and that same relationship. + We would be remiss not to look at what is missing from this part of the text, trying to find meaning in what is purposefully left out. To do so, we can start at the most literal, historical level presented, zooming out a bit.&nbsp; Plum is a young man who has returned from war. We can be sympathetic for that, for the double trauma he has experienced––as a black man serving in World War I and then re-entering a segregated, albeit civilian, society. This re-entry should be another fusion, a coming home. Instead, it seems foreign and increasingly painful, and Plum develops an addiction to alcohol and heroin. They would not have used the term PTSD in 1921, but they might have used “shell shocked.” About the idea that Plum seriously longs for another kind of re-entry, into Eva’s womb, we may initially squirm and similarly pass it off as pathological, as with addiction. But a diagnosis of this sort would be contrapuntal. Morrison does not medicalize Plum’s experience. Rather, the passage normalizes Plum’s desire and his suffering by avoiding those kinds of labels. It does this while still remaining firm in its final assertion that what Plum is experiencing cannot continue. In the same stroke, by refusing to label Plum, it also does not label Eva, and does not cast an essentializing moral judgment upon Eva for burning her son. We might ask whether Eva is guilty (“immoral”), but since the text does not indicate it is important to contemplate such a verdict, a more interesting question might be whether Eva herself feels she is guilty. She weeps, and we certainly trust her tears. The passage is self-aware: it notes this might be “apology or explanation.” The monologue can become Eva’s justification. But that last, throwaway addendum––“just by way of neatness”––is key. Apologies or explanations are also a kind of tidying, a cleaning up. Eva remains outside the realms of that kind of justification; she does not need to give grounds for her action. So if we let it, this can remain the relational mess that Eva understands and does not feel the need to make intelligible to others, only continue to find clarity in within herself. Remember, though, that there are two voices here. And if there are two mouths, there are probably two ears. So perhaps Plum is listening too. As Eva pours the fuel oil over Plum’s body, maybe the slick of the kerosene comes as a rush of relief, also hot licks. Oh, you understand. Oh, you too. I hope so. + You’ll always be my baby. It’s a strange phrase, one that my parents tend to remind me in sing-song––syrupy, sentimental, precisely fitting. It’s just how Eva’s muse concludes. “Sweet Plum. My baby boy.” He always will be. As my ninety-two year old grandmother said on the phone today, after the nor’easter passed and gave way to blue, in a nugget of truth so nonchalant I rushed to write it down so as not to forget: You find yourself at the end of your life in the same place you began.